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09 December 2008

"And then there's no other choice but to write"

The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant -- no, pleasant isn’t the word -- it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write.

It does confirm some of the sentences within some of the paragraphs of the n+1 essay, but I'd remain skeptical of n+1 still -- the writer of that essay has a rather narrow idea of what a novel is and can be, one easily contradicted by the last, oh, 300 years of novel-writing...